Learn Modern Hebrew

Learn Modern Hebrew with these resources

To learn Modern Hebrew, you’re going need a way to learn correct pronunciation, a frequency dictionary to form your base vocabulary, and a good grammar book. You’ll also benefit from a thematic vocabulary book for specialized vocabulary and maybe a book or two, once you learn your first 1000 words. Make sure you read the Method sections of the website, then check out some of these recommended resources (pictures are links):

Pronunciation

Note: As a faster (and more effective) alternative to the following pronunciation resources, check out my Kickstarter project. It will make the first steps of Hebrew much easier for you, because it takes advantage of how your brain works (and how to re-wire it) in a way that traditional tools just can’t. Also, there just aren’t many good resources out there for Hebrew. It’s like everyone assumes you’ve been to Hebrew school as a kid or something. Hmph.

First off, get a feel for how pronunciation works in English. The video tutorials here should help. Once you understand that, start working on Hebrew. Modern Hebrew doesn’t pose many serious pronunciation problems for an English speaker. There are only 5 vowels, and only two tricky consonants, the R and the Ch.

I wish there were some published resources that really covered the basics well, but there aren’t very many. If you’re really starting off, I’d suggest you grab the Teach Yourself Guide, discussed below, since it comes with CDs and a real discussion of the alphabet in the beginning.

Otherwise, you can try Internet resources, which are free (but not always of excellent quality). Here are some of your options:

Last, for large amounts of excellent recorded texts, try the free FSI Basic Hebrew course. They can be a bit dry, but the recordings are pretty wonderful.

To configure your computer to type in Hebrew, go here. You can get a bunch of Hebrew stickers for your keyboard from Amazon, here. Alternatively, you can try a transliteration web app, like this one (doesn’t seem to work very well in Safari, but works quite well in Firefox), and copy/paste each word into Anki.

If you’d like to learn how to write by hand, this series of Youtube tutorials includes instructions for writing Hebrew in both print and cursive as well as background information about the Hebrew alphabet.

Your base vocabulary

I’ve made a base vocabulary list of 400 words to start you off! As I talk about in that article, I find it easiest to translate those words using the short dictionaries at the end of a Lonely Planet Phrasebook; they’re cheap, short and give you good, standard translations for your words (just ignore the ridiculous pronunciation guides). Later, when you’re ready for sentences, you can go back to your phrasebook and grab some. After that, try some of these resources:

Hebrew doesn’t seem to have a decent frequency dictionary. Wikipedia’s list, as always, is a possibility, but it’s dismal to look at. Stick with the vocabulary in the Ha-Yesod grammar book, and supplement it by finding seemingly useful words in a phrasebook. (If you happen to be learning biblical Hebrew, check out this frequency dictionary, but it’s not going to help you with Modern Hebrew.)

Grammar book

The standard workhorse of Modern Hebrew is Ha-yesod. It’s giant, it takes you all the way from the beginning levels to reading newspapers, and it’s a pretty consistent recommendation from anyone studying Hebrew seriously.

If you’re just starting out, you might want to try Lyttleton’s Colloquial Hebrew, which has good reviews and looks very similar in format and style to the Teach Yourself book. Eventually, you’ll probably want to switch to Ha-Yesod, above. It’s been recommended by our users over Teach Yourself Guide. The Teach Yourself Guide to Hebrew comes with CDs and really goes over the alphabet in depth. I’m not the greatest fan of this series (I wish I didn’t have to constantly flip to the back of these books to see half of the material), but they do their jobs and they really do start from nothing.

Book-type book

You can read anything that you enjoy. I’m a big fan of the Harry Potter series in translation, especially if you can find an audiobook version to listen to at the same time as reading.

Other Resources

Monolingual Dictionary

Morfix.co.il is the standard dictionary that most people use. I can’t seem to get it to play nicely with Google translate, but you can use the auto-translate feature in Chrome to get both original definitions/examples of words and their translations. And a reader, Daniel Ziegler, told us about this version, which has definitions in English. Daniel said that to teach himself how to use morfix, he studied resources by Jeff Benner and, for the nikkud pronunciations, the first few lessons of Bill Barrick’s Biblical Hebrew course on YouTube.

Assorted Technical Issues

If you’re running into computer problems with the Right-to-Left aspect of Hebrew, go to Dotancohen.com’s tutorial, which even addresses how to configure Anki to properly support Right-to-Left languages.

I find Google translate a good back-up, and you can type in romanization /transliteration AND it’ll guess what you’re trying to type. So if you hear boker tov, but are not sure how to spell it or what it means, you can write it how you’d think it’d be, and it’ll ask you if you meant בוקר טוב! (Good morning). Works well if you see something written transliterated, like Ivri Lider or other singers/ musicians are apt to do on YouTube videos, and want to search for original Hebrew language version. Google translate has a second handy feature, the microphone, I found this funny comedy series in Hebrew, it was funny without knowing what was said (all cats telenovela, kind of big brother in an apartment building but with cats & voice overs). I slowed video to 75% speed and hit Google translate microphone.. it typed the words first in original language then in my chosen target language. I couldn’t believe it. I did it for three videos…

If you’re not looking for clever uses, and need a great translation app I highly recommend Reverso, it does about ten languages, and it’s my favourite because it does context translation. For copying and pasting the general gist, Google works well. BUT, for instance, colloquial, slang or everyday I think it’s limited. Example, Ivri Lider again, has a song Yoter Tov Klum Mekimat which Google translates as “Better than nothing” bu Ivri lider, Israeli and fluent English speaker (& has an English only band, The Young Professionals) wrote it as “Better Nothing Than Almost” and Reverso context search (which searches written media for words and phrases that match) , their results: “better nothing than almost”. Second example from musician Talisman, and his song Barbarians. The last line, Google translate translated as “and I’m dead on it.” Since the song was about how great beer in a pub, and drinking is, I thought that didn’t make sense… Reverso context, translated it as slang: “and I love it” or colloquial for “I’m crazy about it”

In case anyone’s interested because unlike Ivri Lider, Talisman has no videos with transliterated titles: Tal “Talisman” Ben Nun “Barbarians”: https://youtu.be/zw1zOPjOay4 (translations, and transliterations of this and most songs : lyricstranslate.com and Musixmatch. )

Since I’ve started, I’ve also found YouTuber Linguistix’s channel really helpful (he’s a linguist & pronunciation coach for pronunciation in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Hebrew). i didn’t really connect with Gabe’s diagrams, which are great if you are mechanically minded or have taken other language courses before (but for me were confusing in how to actually apply that knowledge). It only took one viewing of his resh video to properly roll my tongue.